19 January, 2007

Concert ticket bullshit

I'm rather annoyed right now.

I just went online to buy tickets for a Flogging Molly concert. That, in itself, is totally awesome. I'm Irish. They're Irish. It's on St. Patty's day. All good! Or, well, so it would seem.

So I go to the concert ticket page and proceed to order tickets for myself and my good buddy Don. $29 per ticket. Not too bad, considering it's Flogging Molly on St. Patty's day. Okay, I'm cool with that.

Then I get to the checkout page, and the charges begin to add up. Here is a breakdown of the costs, PER TICKET.
Ticket price: $29.00
Building Facility Charge: $3.00
Convenience Charge: $5.00
(What the HELL is so "convenient" about that?)
That adds up to $37.00 per ticket. A bit more ouch.

Then on top of all THAT, I have to pay an additional $2.50 to have the tickets delivered via "TicketFast". What is TicketFast, you might ask? Well, let me explain. It emails the tickets to you. So that you can print them out. It's an AUTOMATED SYSTEM to email the tickets to you. It costs them nothing to do. And yet, it costs $2.50.

Hahaha, and get this. As if all of that weren't enough, I get to the final page where I put in my credit card info, and there's a $3.35 "Order Processing Charge".

This all adds up to a grand total of $79.85, for 2 tickets to a concert. Tickets which started out at $29.00 each. That's $58.00 total. What the hell is this crap about?

The final crowning achievement of this horrible website is that they have time limits on each page. You find the tickets you want, you have 2 minutes to claim them. Creating an account on the site so that you can buy the tickets, you've got 1 minutes. Putting in all of your credit card information, you've got 3 minutes. What about people who type slow? What if you have to get up and take a piss? What if you get distracted in the middle of the order process? You have to start all over. From the beginning. That's what I call a piss poor user experience.

I definitely won't be using TicketMaster again.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I went to get some ozzfest tickets (which are supposed to be free), and i had to buy one of the cd's to get a code ($16 - so much for free?) that was able to be put in from the 8th until the 12th. On the 12th, it was 'open to the public' and at that point, there were no more seats left. Not only that, you basically have no way of getting a pit ticket, or a ticket in the 100 section at Cricket pavillion. Instead, those tickets are SELLING (not FREE) as it is said the concert is... for either $300 or $600 a PIECE. That's right. Not only do you get the pit ticket, but you get to meet ozzy and access to the vip area, parking in a special area.. etc. So basically, someone like me, who just wants to pay $40 for a pit ticket, will never be able to get one ever again. It's just wrong.

So basically, if you want pit/100 level tickets: $300/$600
Seats: $16 (buy the cd) + $10 parking
Lawn: $10 (parking)

Nothing is free, of course!